Sunday, 5 November 2017

FB and this project

Everyone will be aware that I do have a Facebook page associated with this project, but only since earlier this year. But for a long time I did not even have this blog. Old posts on this blog have actually been transferred from another blog. But now I have a website as well, and if Trainweb had Wordpress running on their site, the blog would be over there. Me and FB have grown apart over the year of 2017, and I simply will not rely on their platform for anything substantive. As FB keeps getting bigger, they keep getting greedier and making more demands on their users. But the biggest issue for me is that so much social media is about posing and pretence. Which is why I am going back to FB as primarily a platform for communicating with friends, and not much else. This blog is going to be the primary platform for stuff to do with this project. And the website is also significant and I expect to keep the domain name going for it for at least 12 years and even if I let the domain name lapse it will still be there under trainweb.org/nzrailmaps.

Therefore the NZ Railmaps FB page has been stripped back and doesn't have much on it. Everyone who has a page of any sort on FB knows that their updates feed is constantly full of messages from Facebook telling them how to spend money on advertising or all the things FB thinks they should be doing with their page, like that they haven't posted enough recently. Although that also happens a bit on Google stuff I don't get messages from Blogger every day telling me what I need to do with my blog. The best one of course is my website that doesn't post anything and even its adverts are mostly train related. However adverts on Youtube are very annoying and there is a lot of posers there who are stealing other people's content to make a name for themselves on their own channels. In fact Google is engaged in a constant war with copyright holders because every day Google takes down content on DMCA requests and then the next day they put it back up again. Greed it seems (advertising they can sell on the content on these channels) rules there as well.

It's refreshing to see US lawmakers who are becoming well informed on the tyranny of these giant corporations running free cloud services (Trainweb is definitely NOT in that category) and rapping them over the knuckles. However the US still has a long way to go compared with the EU, and that's because antitrust laws in the US are so weak these days compared to what they were 50 years ago.